She stared at him with wide, unfathomable eyes. There was a long moment of quiet during which he waited, terrified, for her to make her decision. At last she said, “Quiet, they’ll hear us upstairs.”
Jack felt deflated, unable to continue the quarrel at the same pitch as before. The two of them had vented on each other, involuntarily, their identical feelings, and now they stood like lost people on a street corner. But their quarrel still had to pass through its second stage — the dogged and sullen, the retreating, self-justifying stage. “Well,” Jack muttered, “don’t you shout, then.”
“I didn’t shout. You did.”
“Well, I never started it.”
“You were the cause of it.”
“Come off it! I never said a word.”
“That’s the trouble. You never said a word all day.”
“There you go again! Can’t you give it a rest?”
They both wanted to break off the action, but each wanted to fire the last shot. “And another thing,” she said, “don’t you talk so backhanded about my mum in future.”
He sighed, entirely dejected. “Women!” he sighed. “You was looking daggers at her yourself, and then when I say a word — ah, go to bed!”
She backed towards the door, as if expecting him to say something else. He remained silent. When she had gone, he switched off the light and went out into the hall. She was standing on the stairs. “I can’t go to bed like this,” she said, “I won’t sleep a wink. Six weeks engaged and listen to us!”
He managed a clumsy grin. “That don’t do, eh? Not till we’re married! Row as much as we like, then? Eh?”
“I don’t know what came over us.” She lifted up her head stubbornly. “But it was all your fault!” She sighed, “Oh, well, sleep it off, that’s the only thing. We’ll see the funny side in the morning. Good night, Jack.”
“Good night.”
They were both brusque, as if to speak graciously would be to yield one point too many, but they were both relieved. Nevertheless Jack was kept awake for a long time that night by the sense of lingering alarm that follows a narrow escape and he guessed from the sounds of restlessness he heard through the bedroom wall that Joyce, too, was puzzling over their quarrel.
Part Three
Chapter One
The timeless dream of summer was broken early in August when — by a gigantic piece of good fortune — one of Mrs. Wakerell’s cousins brought the news that she was moving in to a Council flat in November, and that Jack and Joyce were welcome to take over from her the three rooms which she at present occupied in Barnsbury, at twenty-five shillings a week.
At last Jack felt solid ground beneath his feet. His new life was no longer an astonished daydream. He and Joyce could now set a definite term to their preparations. They decided to be married at the beginning of December. They inspected the flat, drawn closer together by their proud, possessive happiness than they had ever been before, and took decisions about wallpapers, linoleum and furniture. Now they could look into shop windows and discuss where this clock could go, on which wall to hang that picture, whether these curtains would look nice in the bay window and whether there would be room for that armchair. Joyce wrote cheques under Jack’s supervision (to do so, until she became used to it, filled her with an extraordinary mixture of bliss and terror) and, as their bank balance began to shrink, so the cupboard in her bedroom filled with crockery, cutlery and linen. Their first quarrel was quickly forgotten.
They were on one of their Sunday morning expeditions to Petticoat Lane, stifling in the crowds, the dusty smell and the gritty heat, when Joyce said, “Over there, Jack, on the left.”
“What is?”
“What I told you about. Oh, they’re lovely! Make a room beautiful, they will.”
The crowds between the high black walls were like a battling of armies. People made progress by delivering themselves up to one or another of the warring surges and being ground forward, through the opposing mass, towards their destinations. Jack changed course and was borne away to the left, with Joyce struggling after him.
“This it?” To make himself heard above the din he had to turn his face up to the sky and shout, in the hope that Joyce would hear him among all the shouting of vendors and snatches of conversation around them.
“The next one. The glassware.” The stalls were little islands of bright colour among the swirling black mobs. “Oh, Jack!” cried Joyce, reaching him again and clinging to his arm, “Look! Aren’t they a dream?”
A huge, hoarse-voiced vendor was standing on his stall, ankle-deep in a mess of straw and brown paper amid which gleamed cut glass and brightly-coloured chinaware. He was describing, in a monstrously-magnified whisper, the merits of the utensil which he held aloft with both hands as if it were a hard-won trophy. Here was an article, he announced, known to philosophers as the Great Equalizer, to intellectuals as the Throne of Meditation, and to the vulgar as the Good Old Shoveunder. “Don’t blush, ladies,” he urged, “I can see you’re all married, or about to be —” and indeed, it was remarkable that his entire audience consisted of young couples, each looking exactly like Jack and Joyce, each pair clinging close together and staring up at him in solemn silence — “and if you don’t face the Facts of Life now, you never will.” He had no hesitation, he said, in offering it for their inspection. No home was complete without one, no bride need be ashamed to include one in her trousseau, and you could give one as a wedding present in the knowledge that it would be treasured and appreciated for years to come. This model was the latest triumph of modern design, a perfect combination of beauty and utility, as supplied to the highest in the land, including His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, the Aga Khan, Mr. Ernest Bevin and Miss Margaret Lockwood. They were available in pink, blue, cream, pastel green and daffodil yellow. Note, he said — and here he broke off to command his assistant, “Pass a few round, Charlie” — note the record capacity, the broad brim for comfort, the strength of construction. He invited his audience to test them for balance. They were guaranteed, guaranteed he repeated, to take any weight. Show him, he appealed to his audience, show him the backside that was too big for one of these and he personally would hand the lady or gent a five-pound note. The proud possessor of one of these could hand it down to his children and to his children’s children. No-one need fear burglars with one of these within reach. Heaven help the lodger if he came home drunk and started banging the front door down at two o’clock in the morning. “Why!” the vendor declared, in a final hoarse roar of enthusiasm, “turn it upside down and it makes a perfect air-raid shelter!”
Jack was staring at Joyce, shocked beyond words. “Here,” he managed to say at last, “mean to tell me that’s what you been thinking about?”
Joyce blinked back at him in dismay. “Oh, no,” she squeaked, hesitated as she recovered from her surprise, and giggled. “Oh, no, silly! The idea! Them, I meant.” She pointed at a pair of porcelain statuettes.
“Oh, them. He’ll be putting them up in a minute or two. I tell you what.” Jack was invaded by a sudden mood of recklessness. “I reckon we might as well get one of them jerries while we’re about it.”
“What! In broad daylight? Not with me you won’t.”
“Go away!” Jack was delighted to be able to play the man. “Who’s windy? What you think I am, some old chase-me-charlie, afraid to face people?”
“Oh, Jack,” she begged, at his mercy, “not now!”
He could not miss his chance to swagger before her, to assert his manhood. He fumbled in his pocket for money, ignoring her restraining clutch on his arm. “You leave it to me. I’ll carry it, you won’t have to. I ain’t afraid. There’s no-one living can put the wind up Jackie Agass, and I ain’t a-kidding you.”
“Jack, if you do, you can go home on your own, and I’m not kidding, either.”
“Oh, well.” He was satisfied now that he had made his demonstration. “Not worth an argument, I suppose. Some other time’ll do. Surprised at you I am,
girl, honest. Ah, well, takes a man, some things, I suppose.”
Meanwhile the vendor, after a brisk introduction of the price question, had worked himself up into a frenzy of self-sacrifice, and in a passionate series of grand gestures, had knocked down the price to half-a-crown. Now he was reaping the reward of virtue as fast as his assistants could collect the money. “One on the right,” he was directing, “gent in a trilby at the back, beautiful lady just behind you Charlie. There!” he said, as the beautiful lady took the last one, “And that’s the lot. Engaged or married, madam? Engaged. I knew by the look of you. Well, God bless you, lady, and may your cup of happiness be filled to overflowing.”
The salesman wiped gleaming sweat from his face, recovering his breath like an athlete between races. His assistants gathered expectantly at his feet. At last he wheezed, “Hand up them Arcadian Lovers, Charlie,” and amid a great tearing-off of wrappings and flinging about of straw, the two statuettes were fully revealed. He was going, he resumed, to address himself now to those ladies and gents who were refined enough to appreciate a work of art when they saw one. To those who wanted to fill their homes with beauty. To those who wanted to bring their children up as cultured as themselves. Here, made available for the first time since the originals, by the celebrated Mr. Oscar Wilde, were bought for the nation by the National Gallery, Westminister, was a pair of genuine reproductions in porcelain of that famous pair, the Shepherd and his Sweetheart. Otherwise the Arcadian Lovers.
There were sighs and murmurs from among the girls in the audience. Joyce’s eyes were shining. She whispered, “Oh, them on the mantelpiece, and green plastic curtains, and a big bowl of flowers in the window!” Jack and the other men remained lumpish but alert.
The salesman went on to describe the merits of the statuettes, declaring that a thing of beauty was a joy for ever, and reminding his listeners of the words of the immortal Shakespeare, Breathes there a man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, A little of what you fancy does you good. A man of taste himself, he regarded it as his hobby, rather than his living, to place these treasures within the reach of the general public. He was therefore not going to ask the five golden guineas you would have to pay for a pair like this in Christie’s Auction Rooms, the West End of London, nor even four, nor even three, nor even two guineas, but one guinea the pair. Selling them? He was giving them away.
While he declaimed, there was a stir of feminine whispering in the crowd, all mingling in a single and distinctly supplicatory pitch. Dozens of couples were in conference. He pressed home his advantage, reminding them that he had a limited stock, and that those who were disappointed would only have themselves to blame. His assistants moved forth to the attack.
Joyce squealed, as if she were begging for love, “Oh, Jack, please, please!”
Jack, feeling more than ever the master of the situation, answered, “You wait a bit, girl. I know these geezers.”
None of the statuettes had yet been sold. The men patted their girls’ hands and maintained a sceptical silence.
No takers? — the vendor resumed. Ah, well, he knew how it was after Bank Holiday. Money short everywhere. We couldn’t have the booze and the bawbees, eh? Well, he’d tell them what he’d do. He was a man of impulse, he was a man who acted first and regretted it later. “Make it an even quid. One dirty bit of paper, that was all. No? Seventeen-and-six! Fifteen shillings!”
“Jack!”
“Wait!”
“Jack! We’ve got to! You heard him, it’s art.”
“All right, girl, keep your hair on.”
The girls trembled and the men, all-wise, waited. There were still no takers.
“Gawd, love us!” bellowed the salesman. “You’re a soft lot, aren’t you. Won’t even let yourselves be done a good turn! Look here, I won’t argy-bargy. Twelve-and-six. Ten bob. Me last offer. Say yes before I come to my senses. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes — who?”
No-one.
“Who? Come along, come along — who? Going for ten bob, daylight robbery, may I drop dead if it ain’t.”
There was a dramatic pause. Some of the men began to stir and fumble in their pockets. The vendor did not drop dead and, as if reassured, the men relapsed into their former attitude, heads lowered, eyes vigilant. Joyce was bouncing up and down on her toes, frantic.
The vendor wiped his brow again. “All right,” he said wearily, “my last offer. Three half-a-crowns. No-one at three half-a-crowns? All right, Charlie. Put ’em away, no sale.”
Joyce uttered a broken-hearted sigh. A voice came from the back of the crowd. “I’ll have a pair.” Another voice, “Over ’ere, gov’nor.” The salesman came to life. “Pass ’em out, Charlie, pass ’em out.” Jack took a pair and put them in Joyce’s arms. “There you are,” he said, “all a matter of waiting. Got to know your way around, old girl, if you want to get on in the world, and that’s a fact.”
Joyce said humbly, “Yes, Jack,” and hugged the statuettes to her as blissfully as if they were her own twin babies. There was a tremor of sensual delight in the fierce pressure of her arm against them. She was tasting what, to her, was the primary pleasure of marriage, beside which the pleasures of the flesh were pale and doubtful. She let her weight hang heavily on Jack’s arm, expressing gratitude and admiration, acknowledging her feminine dependence. Jack, as he led her away through the crowds, bragged, “Saved us a few bob there, eh? — didn’t I? You trust your old Jack and you won’t go far wrong.” Her adoring, “Yes, Jack,” was music to him. He had demonstrated his power and right to direct their joint affairs. He was uplifted by a swaggering sense of his own sapience, inflated with lordly generosity. He bought her, despite her happy protests, a gilt brooch with ‘Good Luck’ written on it, and they wandered off to the trolleybus terminus in Bishopsgate, she hugging her statuettes and resting her head on his shoulder, he with his arm tightly round her waist, the two of them a picture of contentment.
Now that a date for their marriage had been set, they were making a round of visits of their friends and relations to spread the news; and on the bus Jack proposed that they should make use of the time that remained before lunch to call on Alf Hogarth, whose home lay on their return journey. Joyce refused, pleading fatigue and saying that she would rather take the statuettes straight home. She suggested that Jack go on his own, and he agreed. He accompanied her to the Angel, saw her across the road, parted from her with a cheerful squeeze of the arm and a promise not to be late for dinner, and made his way back down City Road.
He turned off to the left, into Hoxton, hurrying through narrow, dirty streets that were all stamped with a squalor that was foreign to Lamb Street. It was a depressing district, a disorderly huddle of big factories, blank slimy walls and monotonous rows of little houses, all chopped in a tumbling, disorderly pattern of black against the clean sky. Here and there rose new factories, hideous cubes of ochre brick, and between them gleamed the Grand Union Canal, its dark smooth surface iridescent with pollution. The air smelt of railway grit and stagnant water. He came to a huge black block of tenements, three wings of which, each floor defaced by a rusty iron balcony, looked down on a concrete courtyard, like a great jail with the roof taken off. The fourth side consisted of tall iron railings, forbiddingly spiked. Over the gate was the inscription in iron scrollwork, ‘Bennett’s Buildings, 1863 A.D.’
The great pool of poverty that poisoned the social fabric of London in the last century has almost vanished, but here and there, tucked away amid the growth of new life, noisome puddles can still be found: Bennett’s Buildings was one of them. To Jack, whose upbringing had imbued him with the outlook of that section of the working-class whose proudest possession is the word ‘respectable,’ it was always unnerving to come here. The people in the ‘respectable’ streets hated these slums and their inhabitants as a reminder of their own origins and of the depths into which personal insecurity or some wrench of social change might one day plunge them again. A real hostility underlay the endless feuds which t
he children carried on. Indeed, Jack knew that it was mainly out of distaste that Joyce had refused to accompany him.
A sociable uproar of male voices could be heard through the doors of the little pub across the road, and the playground teemed with stampeding children. Most of the people whom Jack saw looked as neat as their poor clothes permitted them to be, but they all bore the impress of their surroundings. The women were more haggard or shapelessly fat than those in Lamb Street, the girls by comparison were slatternly, the men wore collarless shirts that would not have been tolerated in Lamb Street on a Sunday morning, and the children’s faces were of a pallor which Jack had not seen elsewhere since his childhood. All of them, beneath their superficial vitality, betrayed the dogged weariness of people who wear out their whole lives fighting to hold their ground without the hope of gaining an inch.
He looked uncertainly at the row of staircase entrances that faced him, narrow dark slots like the doors of tombs, each at the foot of a grim shaft of black brick. He could never remember which was Alf’s. Children were gathering round him, and women with babies in their arms were hovering nearby, the babies leaning towards him out of their mothers’ clutches as if they too wanted to inspect the stranger. “Who d’you want, mister?” — one of the women asked.
“Alf Hogarth, Number Ninety-Four.”
“They’re out.”
A terrifying hubbub ensued, with one woman screeching, “They ain’t,” another shouting, “They are, I seen ’em over The Blue Jug,” another testifying, with the clamorous support of a half-a-dozen children, that she had seen Alf and his wife come in, a small boy bleating in terror, “’E’s the School Board!”, a woman in the background asking loudly, “It ain’t the furniture man, is it? They been watching out for ’im,” and another replying, “What, on a Sunday?” Jack said, “Here! —” A woman, leaning from a balcony like a preacher from a pulpit, announced in powerful tones, “You’re his brother-in-law, ain’t you? I seen you with ’im up the Angel once. I arst’ im after. He told me.” The. assemblage seemed to be remarkably well informed on the family life of the Hogarths, for the courtyard resounded with explanations and discussions while Jack escaped and hastened up a stone staircase to his destination. At each landing someone popped out to have a look at him. One woman said, “Your name’s Agass, ain’t it,” and promptly disappeared. Another shouted up to the next landing, “Someone for Alf Hogarth,” and as he was climbing the last few steps a little boy bolted up past him, banged at Alf’s front door, called through the letterbox, “The furniture man!” and scuttled away. Jack knocked at the door. There was no response. He knocked again. A man’s voice bellowed from within, “— orf!” He knocked again. Again the voice, “I’m in me bath. Stick it through the letterbox.” A woman’s voice added, “Stick it up your jumper!” Jack pushed open the letterbox with his finger and called, “That you, Alf? This is Jackie Agass.”
Rosie Hogarth Page 13